Travel and explore South Africa!

South African National Parks offers a variety of accommodation types and standards. Prices are
dependent on location, size of unit and quality of experience. All of our South African National
Parks offer park/camp-run accommodation. Each park/camp has its own unique selection of
accommodation types.

Conserving nature since 1926

National parks offer visitors an unparalleled diversity of adventure tourism opportunities including
game
viewing, bush walks, canoeing and exposure to cultural and historical experiences. Conferences can
also be
organised in many of the parks. Read more...

The morning and evening star is not a star but a planet. Planet Venus.

Proxima Centauri is the nearest known star to the sun, at a distance of about 4.2 light years. It is an intrinsically faint red star, more than ten magnitudes (ten thousand times) fainter than the Sun. It is also much cooler, with a surface temperature of about 3100 C. Its visual (apparent) magnitude is eleven, so it is only visible with a good telescope, and only then from southern latitudes. Proxima is about one-tenth the mass of the sun, which accounts for its low surface temperature. It is possibly an outlying member of the triple Alpha Centauri system just a few light days closer to us than the other, much brighter stars in the group.

Firstly: No, Alpha Centauri is not the morning or evening star, it is in fact (mostly) Venus as cybeR@nger explained.

Secondly: I should have explained "visible" a little better. I meant here with the naked eye. But it is exactly that that makes both of you correct!

When looking at the night sky you will see Alpha Centauri, the brightest star in the pointer of the Southern Cross. But in fact Alpha Centauri is not one star, but consists of a system of three stars that orbit each other. Alpha Centauri A and B is but 4 light hours from each other and orbits each other in 80 years. Alpha Centauri C (also called Proxima Centauri) is aprox. 2 light months from Alpha Centauri B and apparently orbits both of its neighbours. Currently Proxima Centauri is our suns nearest star neighbour.

Your question turned out to be pretty tricky, because, while the triple star system Alpha Centauri is seen as a single star to the naked eye, Proxima Centauri is in fact closer to us than the other two.

Because it is the nearest star to the Sun, it is named Proxima (from the Latin word for "nearest") Centauri.

A PLANET:1. A celestial body that orbits a star, which is not in itself a star or a satellite of another planet.2. Is massive enough to have nearly a round shape because of its own gravity.3. Has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit of other bodies.

THE EIGHT CLASSICAL PLANETS IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM:

1. Mercury2. Venus3. Earth4. Mars5. Jupiter6. Saturn8. Neptune

THE THREE PLUTONS

1. These are small dwarf planets that orbits the sun once in more than 200 years. (They are thus beyond Neptune in the Kuiper belt.)2. Their orbits tend to be more tilted than the classical planets and the orbits are not as round as those of the classical planets.3. They are Pluto, Charon and 2003 UB313. (Though the names still seems to be a point of discussion.)

CERES

1. It is the smallest of the dwarf planets and is a lot smaller than our moon.2. It is situated in the Asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.3. It contains approx. a third of the mass of all the objects in the asteroid belt.4. It has not cleared its neighbourhood of other bodies and is thus not considered as a planet.